Teachers and lecturers are losing it to the status-updates mania

Looking around at the traffic light I can barely see the other side of the street, the view is almost blocked by billboards advertisements and other formats – sizes I can’t define. Formats that are so huge to describe or so small to notice Outdoor media is a mega activity in the kingdom… It has been an actively busy channel, used as a medium of communicating advertising promotions, new product and services launch. Retail, banking to automotive industries, their campaigns best resources are deployed to drive different objectives at different times, not to mention TV. A player that businesses cannot do without in this market, being the main focus and believed to be the most engaging for marketers.

It does a good job to overuse these media channels, but what makes it not so glowing for consumers is that they have other ideas to think of while in the car. Heading home from college or from work, they keep refreshing their time-line. It gets more exciting when radio can sing the morning song while consumers are heading to work or school, but what makes it more challenging is that the notification list on the mobile screen is packed with friends, family members and online peers status updates. Here comes the (statusphere rush), the attention span is becoming shorter and shorter. What makes brands so glowing among other updates in the news feed and different social time-lines on consumer’s phone screen!

In a media consumption report conducted by TNS in KSA late 2011, had illustrated that majority of connected consumers have – checking the time-line on the Smartphone a morning habit that even comes before getting off bed. This is a new form of addictive patterns to what appears to be a phenomenal effect spreading and epidemically prevailing behavior for youth in Saudi Arabia, this is what has got coined as a social disorder “FOMO”, which stands for Fear of Missing Out.. Everybody wants to be updated instantly this very millisecond..

Glued consumers eyes, are to the screens all day long, in the matter of fact I was chatting to one of the university lecturers in Riyadh and he was describing what he sees as a riddle that he couldn’t clearly get, that his students are so distracted during his lectures. Explaining it further he has witnessed several incidents where they tweet Facebook update and Instagram things during the class.

I have noticed people are more into sharing and consuming shorter forms of video formats, in my network of friends online in different social network feeds. This got me more interested to check some new social networks apps like KEEK and VINE during the past three months, which significantly explained why most of the longer (more than 3 minutes) clips in other networks were losing momentum to these new shorter formats. Of course no drastic change to be noticed here, but what is more interesting is the adoption is so high.. According to Alexa traffic ranking for KEEK.COM Saudi comes as #1 country engaged in this platform and the trend for similar platforms is only going higher.

Keek.com Alexa traffic rank

The right ingredients ( High Technology Adoption– Youth – Amazing economy) are present, for brands to engage and innovate in the digital-sphere ,what is holding them ?

2 thoughts on “Teachers and lecturers are losing it to the status-updates mania”

imho, organziations are not yet familiar with out to assess their consumers’ online behavior and thus how to engage them into meaningful ways that justifies their numbers. There are organizations experimenting with it, its only a matter of time and a couple of great case studies to jumpstart this sector.